GNU bug report logs - #18520
string ports should not have an encoding

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Message #29 received at 18520 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org>
To: ludo <at> gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)
Cc: 18520 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#18520: string ports should not have an encoding
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 00:12:58 +0200

ludo <at> gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org> skribis:
>>
>> For error messages, yes.  For associating a position in a string with a
>> previously parsed closure, no.
>
> But wouldn’t a line/column pair be as suitable as a unique identifier as
> the position in the file?

As long as the reencoded UTF-8 is byte-identical to the original.  At
the current point of time, we flag non-UTF-8 sequences with a warning
and continue.

People complained previously about things like Latin-1 characters (most
likely to occur in comments or lyrics where they cause little or
well-identifiable havoc) leading to unceremonious aborts without
identifiable cause.

At any rate, the current behavior does not make sense.  Guile 2.0 might
refuse to turn a string into a port, and for Guile 2.2 the port encoding
may be used to have a UTF-8 rendition of the string characters be
interpreted in another encoding (like latin-1) but not the other way
round.

Both versions make only some half-baked sense.  Most resulting problems
can probably be worked around in some manner, but string ports are
actually the main stringbuf-like mechanism that Scheme has (dynamically
growing strings that are more compact than a list of characters).
Wedging a compulsory code conversion into it that is mirrored in the
port positions seems like a distraction.

> Also, if the result of ‘ftell’ is used as a unique identifier, does it
> really matter whether it’s an offset measured in bytes or in
> character?

In the LilyPond lexer, stuff is usually measured with byte offsets.
Yes, one can certainly parse the UTF-8 character distances and hope to
arrive at the same results as the UTF-8 reencoding.

But the point of GUILE's character set support was not really to make
everything more complicated, was it?

-- 
David Kastrup

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